Medical pumps (examples of which are syringe pumps, IV pumps, LVP pumps, peristaltic pumps, and implantable pumps) provide medicament to a patient through a fluid line during an infusion procedure. However, when an infusion procedure is complete, some of the medicament may remain in the fluid line. If the fluid line is removed for disposal, the medicament left in the fluid line is wasted. It is also possible, in those situations, that the patient will have received less medicament than intended.
In other situations, the fluid line may be left in place for a subsequent infusion procedure. That subsequent infusion procedure results in pushing the remaining medicament into the patient, which may occur at a time when the patient should not get that medicament and without steps being taken to include that amount in the determination of how much of a specific medicament a patient received. Furthermore, the medicament of the second infusion procedure may undesirably mix with the remaining medicament from the prior infusion procedure. To avoid the problem, in such situations, the fluid line may be flushed with a flushing fluid, such as saline, between infusion procedures. The solution used to flush the tubing varies depending upon institutional and standard protocol, however.
One flushing method is to manually clear the fluid line with an infusion of saline therethrough. The manual method has the disadvantage that an incorrect amount of saline may be infused such that the fluid line is either not properly cleared of the medicament or saline is unnecessarily infused into the patient. The rate that the saline is infused might also not match well to the rate at which the medicament was infused creating a risk of side effects, such as might occur with a rapid manual flush. The inability to accurately determine the amount of remaining medicament infused into the patient presents the further drawback that the amount of actual medicament infused into the patient cannot be easily tracked by the medical pump.
To reduce the problems with manual flushing, the medical pump can be used to perform a second infusion-like procedure with a supply of flushing fluid rather than a medicament, such that a flushing procedure is implemented by the medical pump. In that regard, the clinician preprograms the flushing procedure with the programming of the first infusion procedure for the medicament such that the flushing procedure and infusion procedure have a specified relationship prior to the infusion procedure being performed. While that has the advantage that the flushing procedure can be preprogrammed with a precise amount of saline to be infused sufficient to properly clear the fluid line, there are some drawbacks to preprogramming an infusion procedure. For example, the medical pump is tracking the volume of medicament infused, stops tracking when the first infusion procedure ends, and starts tracking the volume infused anew when the flushing procedure begins. As a consequence, the amount of medicament infused is not accurately tracked, thus presenting some of the same drawbacks associated with the manual flushing procedure. Preprogramming the pump also presents potential for confusion when the flushing procedure is to be implemented.